CAD REPORT
FEATURE
CAD of All Trades
BricsCAD V21’s latest features, single file format and direct 3D editing make it suited to a wide range of industries and design tasks. BY RALPH GRABOWSKI
Never mind the big budgets of the companies behind Inventor, Solid Edge and Solidworks. Operating under the radar are a lot of small MCAD systems that are doing just fine. Firms like Ashlar-Vellum, NanoSoft and VariCAD benefit from hundreds of thousand of users whose allegiance keeps the companies afloat, decade after decade. Other small MCAD firms, however, wondered about their future viability, and so allowed themselves to be bought up by billionaire firms, such as SpaceClaim by Ansys, Onshape by PTC and Bricsys by Hexagon. Bricsys is possibly the least MCADlike of these companies. Its software straddles areas like architectural, civil, mapping, mechanical, sheet metal and general CAD. The software is ambidextrous because it uses AutoCAD’s DWG as its do-it-all format. This goes against the grain of Autodesk, which has deployed a different file format for each of its vertical products. This has left Autodesk with a Tower of Babel-sized translation problem; for Bricsys, no translation is needed. A decade ago, Bricsys undertook two moves to help develop BricsCAD more rapidly. It decoupled itself from the IntelliCAD code on which it was originally sold, and then acquired direct editing and 2D/3D constraints technology from Russia’s LEDAS Group. Now that it controls the core code, Bricsys can develop technology for one discipline, and then spread it to others. It has a common platform: what works in BIM, works in MCAD; what works on Windows also works on Linux.
The BricsCAD Lineup
BricsCAD is sold in several editions (prices are for perpetual licenses in Canadian funds): • BricsCAD Shape – A free 3D modeler meant to compete
Figure 1: BricsCAD V21 Ultimate combines general CAD with mechanical and BIM functions
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against SketchUp BricsCAD Lite ($760) – A low-end 2D-only drafting program that includes LISP BricsCAD Pro ($1,280) – General 2D drafting and direct 3D modeling with 2D/3D parametrics BricsCAD Ultimate ($2,680) – All software listed above and below (see figure 1).
Verticals require BricCAD Pro: • Communicator module ($700) -- MCAD file translator • BricsCAD Mechanical module ($2,360) – For assemblies, automatic BOMs and sheet metal design • BricsCAD BIM module ($2,480) – For architectural modeling Civil engineering is currently part of the Pro edition, but I can see it being spun out next year. No CAD vendor is complete without a cloud offering, and so here is what Bricsys offers: • Bricsys 24/7 – Subscription-based online collaboration
10 DESIGN ENGINEERING November/December 2020
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BricsCAD Cloud – Online drawing access inside BricsCAD; available only with a subscription Bricsys Collective – Online store of third-party add-ons
How BricsCAD Mechanical Works
BricsCAD is a direct modeler. This means you don’t start 3D modeling with 2D sketches or work with a history tree. Instead, BricsCAD is like SpaceClaim where you push and pull faces of 3D primitives and apply 2D and 3D constraints. As well, you can import 3D files from other systems and then have BricsCAD convert them to constrained models. As all drawings are stored in DWG format, Bricsys had to come up with workarounds. For example, to create assemblies, BricsCAD attaches parts as xrefs, then connects them with 3D constraints. Some types of data are stored in other formats, such as point clouds in BPT (Bricsys Point Tree) files. Bricsys says its software uses AI, but I suggest the techniques instead involve large-scale search and replace. For DESIGN-ENGINEERING.com
